Grades 5-8 - History and Nature of Science

  • The importance of being Einstein
    The importance of being Einstein

    Experiment finds Earth “dragging” spacetime, as Einstein predicted. For 100+ years, scientists have been proving that Einstein knew his physics. Bending light, gravity lenses, shifting spacetime, spinning neutron stars: Einstein called them all. If so many top physicists are brilliant, why do we keep coming back to Einstein?


    Thursday, May 19th, 2011
  • Peopling the Americas — New evidence
    Peopling the Americas — New evidence

    A report that people were in Texas 15,500 years ago settles a long dispute: The Americans who made Clovis-style spear-points were not the first Americans — despite heavy archeological skepticism. Pre-Clovis rules! But who were the pre-Clovis people, and why are scientists so dismissive of contrary evidence?


    Thursday, April 7th, 2011
  • Evidence of early-onset electrostatic compulsion?
    English is optional dep’t

    Must scientific literature be so darn murky? Do we really need clinkers like “biomedicine” and “astrolicism”? What if they just wrote English for a change? Join us for an entertaining tour of the dark side of the scientific enterprise!


    Monday, March 28th, 2011
  • Climate: Simple = beautiful?
    Climate: Simple = beautiful?

    Earth’s orbit subtly changes over thousands of years, in complex cycles that affect the timing and delivery of sunlight to various regions of the globe. Climatologists have said that when this “Milankovitch cycle” warms the Arctic, it somehow warms the Antarctic. A new study finds that the cycle acts more directly.


    Thursday, March 3rd, 2011
  • Animal love! (?)
    Animal love! (?)

    Researchers finally accept that animals can have emotions. But is love one of those emotions, and how would we be sure? What does neurochemistry and behavioral studies tell us about emotions. Does your dog really love you? Your cat? Do they love each other?


    Thursday, February 10th, 2011
  • The morning after
    The morning after

    It’s as sure as sunrise. Drink too much, and you’ll pay next morning: lassitude, nausea, headache, dizziness, and more specialized agonies will be cause for regret. Hangovers: If you can’t avoid them, will they cause you to drink less? Do fruitflies get hung over?


    Wednesday, December 29th, 2010
  • Bathed in poison!
    Bathed in poison!

    All life requires oxygen, nitrogen, sulfur, carbon, hydrogen and phosphorus. Until now. Bacteria in a toxic California lake that have replaced phosphorus with arsenic are quite healthy, thank you very much. Tune in for our scientific remake of the boffo comedy: “Arsenic in Old Lake!”


    Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
  • Red blowout preventer overlays photo of oil and oil booms floating on seawater.
    In the Gulf, a failure of BP’s fail-safe valve!

    When big tech goes bad, we ask: How do engineers design fail-safe mechanisms for nuclear weapons, radioactive waste, spaceships?


    Thursday, July 1st, 2010
  • Happy tax day: Meet bureaucracy’s roots!
    Happy tax day: Meet bureaucracy’s roots!

    Which came first: The empire or the administration? Conventional wisdom says the demands of empire led to the rise of bureaucracy. But a new study of six early states suggests that the specialization of power and function we call bureaucracy arises at the same time as the territorial expansion that leads to empire.


    Thursday, April 15th, 2010
  • Light brown ceramic jar with large round bottom and spouting top, cracked and chipped with age
    Bottoms up!

    People have been controlling fermentation for at least 9,000 years. What were the ancients brewing, and how did alcohol change society?


    Thursday, December 24th, 2009


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